@HazyKingdom ah. yeah -- 5e is probably the best starting point if you want to get into D&D these days. prior editions (AD&D/2e or especially 3.x incl. PFRPG) are notable for swamping folks upfront due to the sheer complexity of char creation)
I haven't played D&D for a very long time before starting back up with 5e. From what i've heard, they've simplified, ut there's still a lot of good technical crunch to understand.
My personal recommendations: don't be afraid to give 'em a railroaded start, always have an encounter or two planned out, and give them something to look forward to in the next session!
In one of my current DnD 5e parties, all but one of the players are new to tabletop RPGs. Many have some experience with rules-heavy games and some have read enough Forgotten Realms novels to know far more about the basic lore than I expected, but we agreed that the first quest or two would be quite heavily on the rails. Sort of a tutorial to DnD 5e and RPGs in general.
@HazyKingdom Have you taken a look at the rogue archetypes in the PHB? WHat about the 'rogue' do you like (there may be other classes that do things similarly)
@GreySage because rogues are a) ne'erdowells that rely on...internal enforcement mechanisms to maintain organizations, many of which are quite violent, and b) relatively chaotic to begin with :P
@TheRavenQueen alright here
@HazyKingdom ah. more skill-oriented, more ranged-magic-oriented, or more playing-sniper-oriented?
@HazyKingdom Ranged rogues are quite good, especially if you have someone in melee with the target. At level 2, rogues get cunning action, which makes disengaging and keeping one's distance super easy... unless you get surrounded, that is!
@MadMAxJr In one of the combats for our round-robin party, I managed to surround not one, but two characters with ogres... and the characters were our warlock and wizard. Learn to tank, tanks!
@HazyKingdom Depending on how your GM likes it, DnD 5e can be quite a lot like WoW.
@HazyKingdom ok, cool. The 5e rogue is a skillmonkey, there's a lot you can do with it. If you have a chance see if you can get your hands ont he Sword Coast Adventure Guide - there's a great rogue archetype for Swashbuckler that's a lot of fun.
How much variance in mechanics is there from GM to GM? Like if I were to play with this group tonight, would the concepts transfer over to another group?
@HazyKingdom the basics should be fine -- its usually corner cases that are the trip-ups when hopping between GMs. that, and things that aren't tightly controlled by the mechanics (like playstyle emphasis: exploration vs. balanced combat vs. storytelling. also, monster behavior)
Some are more combat, some are more social, some will lock you in a dungeon then start putting phsyical puzzles on the table in front of the players and mutter, "I want to play a little game."
lol nice, definitely dig that. RP on the other hand, definitely not my forte. Basically never done it, hopefully it's not too overwhelming right out of the gates.
I had a GM who put down a written riddle and wanted us as a group to solve it. I argued this didn't allow character skills to factor in. He didn't care and suggested we solve the riddle.
for instance, if you had me as a DM -- my style is relatively exploration-heavy with less emphasis on combat balance (running from encounters is OK in my book)
@HazyKingdom Very much, especially in DnD. People have wildly different ideas on how the game should be played. I personally prefer to play and run DnD as an action movie, lots of combat and tension, with some social interaction but no huge moral dilemmas, nor setting up shop in town instead of adventuring or carefully managing supplies for a 20-day cave excursion.
only various threads -- and enabling one thread can disable others. but if you want to talk more about that we're better off hauling off to the NAB @MadMAxJr
@MadMAxJr I guess, to an extent I'd say that's bad RP (rather than wrong); if the character would do it, it's correct RP. Whether that character is good for RP is a different story (and I agree, good RP helps the story and helps others)
Somewhat agree. I don't allow evil at my table without my express consent. I care about the players having a good time. I care far less about playing the character 'accurately'.
I stress to all my players that they are responsible for everyone's enjoyment around the table, not maintaining the integrity of a fictional character they brought in.
The new players, in particular, have absorbed this rule very well.
I have a few players who want to come to the table and show me 8 pages of backstory they prepared that weaves them tightly into certain elements of the setting. Twice that's resulted in them asking to explore some of that which would have completely derailed or abandoned the material I had prepared. If I were younger and had more time for freeform RP, I'd be okay with that, but I'm in my mid 30s with a 9 to 5, so I'd prefer we stay close to the material I've worked on in my limited free time.
I try to ask players to limit their background hooks to three sentences that fits on a 3x5 notecard these days. Enough for me to do interesting things with their character fluff/flavor, but not so much I need to start writing wiki entries to keep track of player lore.
at my current table, there is a variety of things happening at their home city that is related to their background in a way or another, some are part of the original adventure and i simply adjusted, others i had to insert.
Example, lets say one of the characters is a runaway from an assassin's guild. They are seeking revenge against the leader of this guild and bla bla bla on his background. To go after his background, i would have to make the group travel all the way to the town where this takes place, the location of said guild. Instead, i inserted a small faction of that group in their current town, and they have no idea yet.
If you throw a rubix cube at me, the rogue better darn well be able to roll disable to dismantle the thing and just put it back together in the solution.
Rather than having me break the GM's cube or peel all the stickers off it. :P
For a physical, meatspace game though, there is one important rule. If your host is providing snacks, drinks, and/or pizza, give your host a couple dollars. Not as an obligation, just as a courtesy. :P
@HazyKingdom Basically the only really botched DnD characters I've seen have been either really unenthusiastic about going to adventures or deliberately very bad at co-operating with their party. The first category includes those guys who respond to quest offers with "what's in it for me?" and require fifteen or so minutes of coaxing to get to respond to the plot hook. Being an edgy mercenary is cool as long as it doesn't get in the way of the pacing.
I seem to recall the GM screen for Hackmaster actually had a table for determining pizza tip and a quick approximation table for splitting pizza costs per player.
@NautArch I'm of the opposite feeling. I prefer puzzles to be for the players. Otherwise it just amounts to "I rolled a 26 investigation. I solved the puzzle, yes? can we move on now?" That isn't a puzzle. It's just a pointless roll. There is some nuance in there; proposing certain solutions that would be modeled by an ability check are fine, but generally I would rather not have puzzles/riddles at all than to make the solution always "someone roll me a check to see if I tell you the answer."
@kviiri Excellent, should be a good way to work things out for starters. When you say "go adventuring" , this is starting a campaign right? Or is this like a smaller piece to a campaign?
@Adam It somehow irks me that smart players can leverage their brains in the game but strong players can't bypass climbing or heavy lifting checks by lifting things in real life, but I guess that's one of the things in life one has to get used to.
@NautArch You could always take a page from Fate's book: when your player rolls high enough to succeed the puzzle, they narrate what the puzzle was and how they solved it
@HazyKingdom really, "go adventuring" means "play the game" Some people resist this, despite being the whole reason they are together in the first place.
@MadMAxJr I raise with "the age old discussion about pop-culture osmosis of DnD alignments diluting the popular perception of those alignments to singular descriptions of a character's personality, rather than being very broad categorizations"
As a paladin, you determine the merchant has been using shady but legal price-fixing methods and supply controls to ensure he stays the only supplier for certain alchemical goods. You also detect he is lawful evil. Lawful Good = I will pursue a legal action and bring the evidence to the baron! Lawful Stupid = EVIL, STAB STAB STAB.
@Adam pathfinder has a subsystem to handle things like that (puzzles, riddles, investigation), basically you treat the problem as a creature, with a certain number you must roll in order to "cause damage", and an amount of "hit points" it has. Every sucessful check solves part of the issue, but it takes time and more checks to finally solve it.
@HazyKingdom Not always, some people are just really confused about this whole "playing" thing. They don't understand the point is to have fun, not stick to some arbitrary rules they think people expect of them.
@HazyKingdom They're quite often just unaware of what they're actually doing. They focus too much on keeping the idea of their character (who might well be a mercenary who refuses tasks with insufficient rewards) instead of focusing on playing the game.
@ShadowKras There was an Unearthed Arcana about complex traps with a similar procedure to that. The problem I have with that is that the solution sounds like it goes from "somebody make me a check to see if I tell you an answer" to "Everyone make me 5 checks to see if I give you the answer" Granted, I have not used such a system, so I don't really know for sure.
In short, his homebrew 5e init system is: Roll each round. D4 = ranged, d6 = move, d8 = melee, d12 = spell, d6 = anything else, +d8 to swap gear, +d8 for bonus action, low goes 1st.
Iv used the research rules when they were first introduced (mummy mask campaign), and they worked out really well at my table. For each information i was supposed to give them, i prepared a handout, so every time they "damaged" the library, they had some piece of information to read and try to piece together.
Also, as a GM, try not to make players miserable by having the paladin find himself near a lever that controls the path of a runaway mine cart that will hit a local magistrate or five laborers tied to the tracks.
@HazyKingdom Three and a half is good, pretty close to what we usually do. Longer games tend to have a higher ratio of off-topic chit-chat to gameplay, but as long as you're having fun it's all good :)
The idea of a greedy mercenary hero is not incompatible with DnD. A character can request more payment for every quest they are ever offered. But when played well, it won't get in the way of enjoyment. When a good player plays such a character, everyone around the table knows they'll join the quest - whether they get the extra pay they keep requesting might vary between quests.
I mean in combat, the creatures can fight back. There is tension as everyone reacts to each other. But if the challenge is a non-responsive riddle or a puzzle, then the way to solve the problem with dice is "throw checks at the problem ad nauseam till it goes away" I suppose the best middle ground would be a puzzle that both reacts to failed checks, but can also be solved by figuring out the correct actions and then taking them.
that way you get a response with dice, or you can go through it all mentally without needing to ever roll any checks
So TLDR; Each GM is different. They're as broad as colors in a rainbow. Only there's a horrible mimic pretending to be the pot of gold at the end of it.
I think GMs are different in DnD more than some systems. Many "post-Forge" games like Apocalypse World try to explicitly guide GMs to run the game in a particular manner.
@MadMAxJr I would never do something like that, but guess whose game tomorrow will have three chests, two of which are mimics, and a host who knows which one is real and will reveal one of the mimics after the players choose which chest they'd like to open first...
@Adam I seriously considered throwing the good old "gnomes with black or white hats" induction puzzle to my party, but decided against it at the last minute :P
@MadMAxJr When I had the opportunity to design the psionic dragons for Psionic Bestiary I was told that I had to make one based on the Dread class, which is all about fear and manipulating fear
@ShadowKras Yes, but that's why I said "non-responsive" riddles or puzzles. If there is no penalty for failure, and you try to model a riddle or puzzle with dice rolls, you might as well not include the puzzle at all and let the party continue on. Granted, in such a case, perhaps a puzzle was a bad encounter choice no matter how you model the solution
The wyrms I came up with, Scourge Dragons, deliberately feed on apex predators not to eat their flesh necessarily (they're dragons, they can eat anything) but to feed on the released fear of the things those predators terrorized
So you get like the little wyrmlings going after ghouls or goblin war camps and the like
And the bigger ones that just show up out of the blue to tangle with the sorts of things that eat cities
@kviiri I understand that feeling. I do a fair bit of strength training myself, and it kinds of gets to me too that no matter how strong I get, my character is no better. But I can study things like strategy or synergy with other classes and make my character far more effective.
@GreySage The party is kidnapped by a hill giant, who puts a cursed cap on each. He tells the party that each cap is either black or white, can't be removed for inspection, and prevents communication of the others' cap colors to them in any way. Then he leaves them in a dungeon cell. Every now and then he pops in to ask whether someone has figured out the color of their own cap. If yes, they get out - but if they guess wrong, they get eaten.
@Adam this is also why i'm liking the encounter i'm building (the Cube-style one). It gives the players a chance to be characters (interact with the surroundings, learn as they RP and/or roll investigation checks), and then still e a player to put the pieces together.
And when you run out of apex predators, introduce a simple mouse, who lives at the bottom of a blackened crater, where nothing can grow. Be sure to express how nothing that has seen the mouse has lived for long, but the mouse is simply a mouse by all means of inspection.
One of the main reasons I decided against it, in addition to it being a complete mood shift from the campaign preceding it, is the contrived ruleset imposed by the magic cap.
Also I have to say, Dishonored 2 went way out of its way to make the nonlethal options feel more like revenge than the first game. Like, the nonlethal options in the first game were pretty horrific but it's like the devs looked at them and went
@Lord_Gareth yeah, sometimes the best penalties are subtle ones (like making it so that all the druid groves in the land are saddled with a burdensome tax regime ;)
